Developer Showcase: Vishwasrao Salunkhe, Virtusa

Our Developer Showcase blog series serves to highlight the work and motivations of developers, users and researchers collaborating on Hyperledger’s incubated projects. Next up is Vishwasrao Salunkhe, a lead consultant at Virtusa.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain?

First start with the basic concepts of Blockchain like Cryptography, Consensus algorithm, Peer to Peer communication, distributed applications. Once you are comfortable I recommend completing the below course to get a high level overview of Blockchain:

After this course, you can start playing with Hyperledger Composer Playground and start with existing examples, understand how to define business network, Assets, Participants, Transactions and Events.

You should be familiar with JavaScript. You will be able to define business network in Hyperledger Composer with a JavaScript like Language. Also with help of NodeJS SDK you will be able to talk to the underlining Hyperledger Fabric network. So, only with the JavaScript Language you will be able to develop applications (frontend, backend) around Hyperledger Fabric.

Vishwasrao Salunkhe, Lead Consultant, Virtusa

What project in Hyperledger are you working on? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

I am working on Hyperledger Fabric. I started working with Fabric 0.6. Once I got the basics of it, I started writing a smart contract in the Go Language. There were few issues I was facing like setting the Hyperledger Fabric network, writing smart contracts in Go (new language for me) and deploying the smart contracts.

Hyperledger Composer is life savior for me, it made my job so easy that I am able to define my business network, assets, transactions etc with a JavaScript like language, deploy locally and test it. Before defining my own business network, I went through all existing demo business network and tried to run them, then changed a few things like assets attributes, participant’s attributes and transactions.

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

Make developers’ lives easy. Until we have an ecosystem of tools around Hyperledger to design, develop, test, deploy blockchain applications, developers will not be able to move fast with Hyperledger

With Hyperledger Composer, it’s easy to get started, so we need more tools like Composer.

As Hyperledger’s incubated projects start maturing and hit 1.0s and beyond, what are the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result from your perspective?

Prior to the 1.0 release of Hyperledger Fabric, people had so many business cases to solve with blockchain but they were not enough tools to get beyond POCs. But with 1.0, people started going beyond POCs or MVPs. Some businesses are already started to use Hyperledger Fabric in production. This is good sign. Also, now new apps, tools frameworks are sprouting up all over.

I would like to see more tools and frameworks come up which will help to speed blockchain implementations. Also, giants like IBM, SAP, Oracle will come up with integrations of their existing applications with Hyperledger.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in 5 years?

“Internet made people to come close, now blockchain will make businesses to come close”

As per hype made in media that blockchain will be mostly used in financial sector, I think not only in finance but fields like supply chain, Insurance, retail and most importantly government sectors will also be covered by blockchain. And Hyperledger will be leading blockchain.

Goods moved from sender to receiver go through various transportation mode and different insurance companies are involved.

Containers are IoT enabled and data sent from them are stored into Blockchain network. Now when goods are with Transporter 1 and while transporting he does not follow business contract (E.g. Temp of containers should be below 5 degree all time), because of that some containers are not damaged/not useful, then T1 will get penalized based on smart contract and claim processing of these damaged goods will be trigger automatically for Insurance Company 1.